MANAGED SECURITY SERVICES – A Step Forward

Managed security services have matured significantly over the past decade. Traditional managed security services have largely been limited to managed firewall and VPN. Over the last 5 years, the demand for other security services has increased significantly. Today, managed security services include a wide range of services including firewall, Layer 7 Application Control, IDS/IPS, content filtering, antivirus, and many others.

Moreover, with rising digitization and increasing internet usage, the demand for managed security services (MSS) in India has been growing over the last few years.

Managed Security Services provide a systematic approach to support an enterprise’s daily and periodic security needs. It helps to manage all functionalities of a security department and provides a better RoI for a lesser TCO in most cases, as far as specialised security maintenance is concerned. Whether on ground or on the cloud, this aspect of the security industry is growing exponentially – expected to reach USD 29.9 billion by 2020 and is expected to register a CAGR of 15.8% between 2014 and 2020, one of the fastest in any IT sectors!.

Aravindan Anandan, Consulting Systems Engineer, Asia Pacific, Barracuda Networks extols the virtues of MSS, “Managed Security Services can be cost effective for companies that want to invest using an Opex model of procurement. Choosing the right MSSP provider is key to ensuring good services.”  Symantec provides its own Managed Security Services -Advanced Threat Protection (MSS-ATP), meant for ATP attacks only. “ Enterprises are often faced with challenges such as overworked and understaffed security teams that are stitching together “good enough” security point products that weren’t designed to work together. Not only does this make the organisation more vulnerable to breaches, but it also increases operational complexity. Managed Security Services are the around-the-clock remote management or monitoring of IT security delivered by experienced professionals via remote security operations centres (SOCs),”

Tarun Kaura, Director Solutions Product Management, Symantec says, “Symantec’s MSS-ATP significantly reduces the time it takes to detect, prioritize and respond to security incidents by producing integration between its endpoint security and third-party network security vendors’ products. This data enables customers to rapidly and effectively contain, investigate and remediate unknown and zero day attacks that evade traditional security solutions. By prioritizing real threats, IT organizations can reduce false positives and operating costs and ensure that they are protecting against the most significant vulnerabilities. ”

The biggest advantage of having a managed security vendor using the cloud is the cost optimisation. As Jitendra  Ghughal, National Channel Manager, Fortinet India says, “Customers want to use the same pay-as-you-use model for firewall security as they do for compute and storage. Managed Security Services allows customers to deploy and scale the solution to meet immediate and growing security demands, while also maintaining predictable cost models.”